Pound the facts, not the table

When it comes to transparency and Gov. Chris Christie, let's be very clear about a few things right from the start.

For a governor so eager to demand reform and accountability from everyone else, Christie and his administration have repeatedly shown an unwillingness to operate by the same standards. And no amount of snide, arrogant comments from Christie or his staffers is going to change that basic fact.

Christie has things he wants to hide. In that, he's not really any different from any past governor, Democrats and Republicans alike, or any other politicians for that matter. But there's an aggressive quality to Christie's image protection program that goes beyond the norm. It speaks to a thin-skinned leader with grand ambitions to the highest office in the land whom is making those ambitions his first - and perhaps only - priority.

If that means carefully manufacturing reasons to renege on promises, so be it. If that means hypocritical and inconsistent positions melded to fit his most pressing political need, so be it. And if that means throwing up roadblock after roadblock trying to prevent closer scrutiny of federal Sandy recovery spending, that's OK too.

Because it's all for the greater good of Chris Christie and his presidential vision.

Christie's stonewalling routine has been particularly evident in tracking the Sandy-related spending. The governor has balked at several transparency initiatives designed to maximize oversight, and his administration has all but ignored the state's sunshine laws in trying to deny access to public records regarding some of that spending.

The Asbury Park Press has been put off for months in an effort to learn more about the contract bidding process that led to Christie and his family starring in this year's "Stronger than the Storm" commercials, which effectively became taxpayer-funded campaign ads. The newspaper continues to wait for the first documents originally promised them in October as part of a "rolling" release of the records.

Other watchdog groups, including the Sierra Club and the Fair Share Housing Center, have expressed similar frustrations in their own efforts to excavate public records. The administration's answer to that is to simply denounce the main spokesmen for those agencies, Jeff Tittel and Adam Gordon respectively. Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak, who is skilled at channeling the governor's pompous disdain for critics, dismissed Tittel and Gordon as "a real rogues gallery of critics with axes and agendas to grind" to whom the administration has no "earthly reason" to respond.

Christie took it up a notch, ridiculing the Fair Share Housing Center as a "hack group that I'm just not going to waste my time and my breath on.''

That's standard operating procedure from Christie and his minions, putting the bully in the bully pulpit. Gordon summed it up very well: "As Christie, like any good lawyer, knows, if you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table."

Christie's great at pounding the table. New Jerseyans enjoy that style for the most part, and they particularly appreciated it during and after Sandy, when it felt like the governor was truly fighting for his state. The governor owes a lot of his popularity to his immediate post-storm performance.

That's also why the administration's obstructionism regarding the Sandy spending shouldn't come as much of a surprise.

Those public records may unveil a far less righteous and noble Christie all too willing to abuse his power in allowing recovery money to be spent - and wasted - to further his own interests.

Christie doesn't like to come clean about much of anything regarding his own administration. He clamped down on revenue records that would have debunked his "Jersey Comeback" myth. He has vetoed efforts for more transparency of transportation finances and for-profit hospital operations. He blocked more Port Authority scrutiny in the wake of toll hikes.

His administration typically ducks appearances before legislative committees - those Democratic leaders are mean and unsupportive - and Christie has refused to meet with editorial boards at Gannett New Jersey and the Star-Ledger, because we're apparently mean and unsupportive too.

The administration must quickly deliver on the public records requests before it. There's no good reason that it couldn't have already provided those Sandy documents to the Asbury Park Press. The Fair Share Housing Center had to sue to get some of the records it wanted. Other groups may have to follow the same course to compel officials to properly follow the law.

Maybe those records won't be very interesting or embarrassing at all. Maybe we'll wonder why the administration was so resistant. We're often amazed at the innocuous nature of documents that governing bodies seem loathe to release.

But the longer the stonewalling continues, the worse Christie looks, regardless of what the records will show. There's a pervasive ends-justify-the-means quality to Christie's governing these days, and when the end is potentially the White House, that can drive a man to ignore the casualties along the way.

New Jerseyans overwhelmingly re-elected Christie, but they should also realize that when the best interests of the governor don't match up with the best interests of the state and its residents, we will not come first.

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Pound the facts, not the table

When it comes to transparency and Gov. Chris Christie, let's be very clear about a few things right from the start.

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